Are recently-built machines slower than others?

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Edge100x
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Are recently-built machines slower than others?

Post by Edge100x »

We've had a few customers who have come to us confused because we're building many new machines with E5-2697v3 processors, which is a 2.6ghz base-clocked part, when we used previous generations of Intel processors with higher clock rates (the E5-2690v2, for instance, was a 3.0ghz part; some previous generation processors ran at 3.46ghz). These customers have asked whether we have switched to slower machines.

Our performance testing has confirmed that these latest-generation processors, at 2.6ghz, actually run faster than the older-generation ones at higher clock speeds. This is because of architectural improvements made to their design, both internally (more instructions per clock, better turbo support, more efficient cache, etc.) and externally (faster memory/more memory bandwidth, higher-clocked QPI, SATA3 across the board, etc.).

The E5-2697v3 processors also run faster on a per-core basis than most other E5-26xxv3 processors, by virtue of their higher starting turbo frequency (as shown in this comparison chart) and high turbo frequency when all cores are in use. At the same time, they have near the high end of cores per processor. These factors combine to make them a very attractive choice, and one which has allowed us to increase performance while at the same time lowering prices.

The fact that lower-clocked processors can outperform higher-clocked ones has always been a source of confusion for consumers. Historically, it has come up not just when looking at different processor generations from the same manufacturer, but also when looking at processors by competing manufacturers -- back in the days of the Pentium processor, Citrix and AMD had processors that were faster than Intel's at the same clock speed, for instance. They chose names for these processors that were designed to reflect the approximate equivalence to Intel's.

As an extreme example of two processors with wildly different performance but similar clock speeds, compare the Intel Nocona Xeon 3.6 Ghz processor from 2004 with the Intel Skylake Xeon 3.6ghz processor from 2015. The newer processor contains four cores instead of one, eight times the cache, and is at minimum several times faster -- but that's certainly not apparent from just the clock speed!
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